


in other worlds than this

by Jade_Sabre



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, and you thought things couldn't get any crazier, fic of a fic of a d&d campaign, here we are, translator nerds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25101454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_Sabre/pseuds/Jade_Sabre
Summary: The tales of the translators behindKhem's Codices.
Relationships: Jadesa/Serannis, Khemuret Xul/Taliesin Harper | Taliesin Ferryman
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	1. slave!verse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fionavar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Khem's Codices](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15701094) by [Fionavar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar). 



> If you're not familiar with [_Khem's Codices_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15701094/chapters/36489219), this...might make sense, but why wouldn't you go read those first?
> 
> Anyway, to quote the lovely Fionavar, within those pages "the translators Serannis and Jadesa have been mentioned in passing. The circumstances that lead to Khem's precious journal falling into the hands of people who decode and translate it have not yet been determined, so they're kind of Schrodinger's Canon: at some point the waveform will collapse and there will be canon and AU, but at the moment they're all equally possible." 
> 
> So please enjoy the following scenarios.

_They may be slaves, if this work is being done under the RWs, but if so they’re valued for their knowledge and not ill-treated_.

* * *

It pays to be an educated slave.  
  
Well, it doesn’t, because if it did they wouldn’t be _slaves_ , right, but it’s definitely better than being an uneducated slave. Most of the time. Sort of. Ish.  
  
Jadesa stares at the ceiling of her cell, though she can’t actually see it in the darkness, and forcibly turns her thoughts away from the old familiar unproductive spiral and to the latest translation argument she’s lost. She’s _sure_ that, given the context of the five languages around it, given the most recent cipher twist, given the physical evidence of a quill pressing so hard it nearly punctured the paper, that Khem _can’t_ be using the word in anything other than the Mulhorandi sense of it, as unlikely as that seems. It’s simply too strong for the situation to be anything else, no matter _what_ the barakir thinks—  
  
but hey, at least this barakir didn’t whip her for disagreeing, so maybe she’s finally moving up in the world—  
  
“You’re still awake,” Serannis says from his corner of the darkness.  
  
She sighs and turns on her side, away from the wall. “Maybe,” she says, and she hears him snort softly. As usual. They haven’t known each other that long in the grand scheme of things, especially not in the grand scheme of an elf’s longevity, but they’ve already established their little rituals, the touchstones so necessary between the enslaved. Necessary and dangerous, of course, because a slave can’t actually _trust_ anything, or anyone, let alone their actions; but to actually live that way could only drive one insane. They only had to look at their masters to see the truth of that. Nishkir Khemuret Xul’s diary was merely one in a long series of perfect examples–although hers seemed a little more tragic. Raised incapable of trust and thus destined to be driven mad, but also chanced to be driven equally mad in their quest _to_ trust.  
  
In any case, she doesn’t _trust_ Serannis, exactly, though she likes him more than most of the fellow slaves she’s met as she’s been passed from project to project. He seems to feel the same way about her. It makes working together easier, and being locked in the darkness at night less—difficult.

“Don’t worry,” he says, and not for the first time she wonders if he’s old enough to understand what being a slave really _means_ , whether he was raised in it, whether he was caught and still dreams of freedom. “I’m sure the barakir will come around.”  
  
“Thanks,” she says, reining in a snort of her own, “but I’m not going to bet on it.”  
  
“Well,” he says, and then he lapses into silence, as he is wont to do. She hasn’t known too many elves and isn’t sure if this is a thing they do because they have so much _time_ , or if it’s just Serannis. It drives her a little crazy, to be honest, because there’s so _much_ to discuss and _so little time_ , at least to themselves. They must be close to something that somebody’s heard of before because the workdays have nearly doubled in length, regardless of their ability to make any real progress in that time. She’s stuck waiting for the flora and fauna specialist to get back to her about some subspecies of bush she’s never heard of, and Serannis has been tracing the same rune on every spare surface he’s encountered for the past two days. And it’s all about some dumb dungeon crawl and Khem and Harper have barely talked at _all_ and—  
  
“I read ahead,” he says, crashing into her thoughts. “Just a little. It only makes sense if you’re right.”  
  
“How could you read ahead?” she asks, sitting up, startled. “I thought you were still—”  
  
“Well,” he says again, but the pause is shorter this time and anyway she can’t think about anything else beyond _how_. “It’s not good if any one of us fall behind, is it. It’s—better, if we’re all stuck together.”  
  
She draws her knees to her chest. Perhaps he understands better than she thought. “ _Adhi_ ,” she says. “She’s never used it before.”  
  
“I know,” he says.  
  
“It’s not just part of the code,” she says. “It’s _important_.”  
  
“You’re right,” he says, and she flops back onto her pillow.  
  
“Fat lot of good it does me,” she says. If he’s right, and she’s _right_ —well, the barakir will never admit it, although at least this one doesn’t go around bragging about her discoveries as if they belong to them. Which they technically do, so she really shouldn’t _care_ —  
  
but this project keeps undoing all her years and years of holding her longings at bay, the locks and chains that keep words like _freedom_ just out of her reach, unknown and unwished for. She’s always known—too much, but sitting and reading a wastet-le calling their kvaleth _akhi_ is–is—   
  
_liberating_ , and dangerous.  
  
“You’re still awake,” he says, as if this weren’t perfectly obvious. It’s his way of asking _are you okay_ , with his damn elf ears that can probably hear every change of her breath if not the hammering of her pulse beneath her skin. He can see her too, sort of, like shadows in the mist, he’d told her once, and she’d laughed and told him to save his poetry for the birds, but really she’s just trapped in the darkness with only the knowledge that he was there too when they shut the door and turned the key in its lock.  
  
“I should go to sleep,” she says. “So should you.”  
  
“If you’re sure,” he says, and he is too _kind_. Perhaps he thinks he knows what this life is—perhaps he’s never had a barakir beat him, or an alakir leave him chained to the wall because no one thought to tell them they shouldn’t. Perhaps all his masters have been as relatively benevolent as this one. Perhaps he prefers his freedom contained in the books he reads; perhaps he is content with walls and light through a window he’ll never see and the safety of never having to choose anything for himself.  
  
She turns on her side, facing the wall, pulls the thin blanket up over her shoulder, and closes her eyes; but her heart pounds within her chest and he says, “Larks are the only passerines that lose all their feathers in their first moult, you know.”  
  
“Oh,” she says to the wall, “are they.”  
  
“There’s twenty-one genera of lark,” he says, “divided into ninety-eight species, at least that we know of in this part of the world, though I’ve seen references in books to at least another thirty that disappeared during the Spellplague. All of them have multiple scutes on the hind side of their tarsi, which is unusual for songbirds, of which larks are generally considered one of the sweetest varieties, and they nest on the ground. The genera are as follows: _Alaemon_ , _Chersomanes_ , _Ammomanopsis_ , _Certhilauda, Pinarocornys_ …”  
  
His voice drones on, soft, rhythmic, gentle, soothing, dredging up blurred memories in her tired mind of a time when someone sat with her and stroked her hair in the darkness. Memories she’s tried to forget, but it’s too late for that now and she’s dimly aware of her breathing slowing, of Serannis’s voice quieting in response until he’s less whispering words and simply murmuring a low _shhhhhhh_ , and just like that, she slips into sleep.


	2. office!verse

_Current theories include b) historians/scholars are working on this primary source_

* * *

Serannis blinked, realized he’d stopped sketching runes and started sketching someone—some _thing_ —else, and immediately ripped the page from his notebook and crumpled it. He held it in one hand and rubbed his face with the other, sighing and mentally kicking himself for his inability to concentrate. To be fair, he’d been working for nearly six hours straight, and there were definitely labor laws against that. He was legally obligated to take a break, which for him mostly consisted of pushing his chair away from his desk and then propping his feet on it. He rolled his head, trying to relax his shoulders, ended with his head tilted back so he could look out the window over his desk.   
  
Someone else had wanted the view of the mountain out the other window, so his overlooked the courtyard and the solid stone wall on the other side. He could at least see two of the scraggly trees that passed for greenery in the space, though most of their inhabitants had flown south for the winter. He occasionally still saw a sparrow (species) or, more likely, a crow (species), and sometimes he’d engage in staring contests with them, trying to see how long they’d stick around after they spotted him watching. Not long enough, usually, but then he’d get to watch them fly away and something about that still—and how old was he? old enough—utterly fascinated him, filled him with sheer delight and a wonder he’d never quite found anywhere else in the world. At least not in any _thing_ else in the world.  
  
Today the view out the window was particularly bleak, cloudy with the dirty remnants of trampled snow scattered over bare earth and not a single bird in sight. He sighed again, tilted his head from side to side to stretch those muscles, rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers and remembered he was still holding the crumpled drawing. His desk had many crumpled sheets of paper, but he needed to make sure this one in particular went straight in the waste bin—not the overflowing one next to his desk, but the big one in the corner by the door, and with that in mind he swiveled his chair around and started to stand—  
  
“You taking a break?” his officemate asked, her back to him, and suddenly he was glued to his seat.  
  
“Ah,” he said, tightening his fist. “I guess? Everything was starting to run together.”  
  
She spun around in her chair, picking her feet up so as not to impede her movement. He watched her hair fly in her face, noted the tight grip of her hands on the seat as she spun once, twice, three times before finally deigning to dangle one foot, and he watched as her toes brushed the floor, gingerly at first, then more firmly, until at last she had slowed to face him. Except he was still staring at her toes, marveling at her disdain for footwear even in the winter, admiring the surprisingly lovely shade of blue polish she’d chosen this week, utterly fascinated.  
  
“I hear you,” she said, and as his gaze traveled up to her face she reached up over her head and leaned back and _stretched_ and he had to look at the ceiling before he started blushing. “I’m almost at the end of translating this list of obscure Undercommon fungi for Alytha, but then Connor just sent me a whole paragraph in Rashemi—”  
  
“Rashemi?” he said, startled, and the prospect of a normal work conversation made looking at her easier. “I don’t remember decoding anything that turned out to be Rashemi.”  
  
“He thinks it has something to do with some kind of mirror-writing section he’s stuck on,” she said, stretching again and yawning as she did so. He covered his mouth as he yawned in turn, remembered his sketch anew, and pressed his lips tightly together as she continued, “Problem is, Khem only _ever_ uses Rashemi as a cover for scatological insults.” He blinked. “Because that’s all Rashemen’s good for, right?”  
  
“I suppose,” he said. Which was lame, and she was yawning again.  
  
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s something to do while I wait for the latest Infernal section. The last few bits have all been Thayan and Barakir’s been hoarding them. Are you heading to the café?”  
  
“Um,” he said, startled by the change in subject and the realization that he in fact had no plans other than trying to recycle something without her noticing. “I don’t know. Maybe?”  
  
“Oh, okay,” she said, this time leaning so far back in her chair that if he hadn’t been used to her he would have worried it would tip over. “I was just thinking if you were I could really use some tea. And chocolate.”  
  
“I can get you tea and chocolate,” he said, standing up before he quite realized what he was doing. “What kind?”  
  
She perked up, and he failed miserably to quash an echoing smile. “Herbal, and dark,” she answered, still smiling, and then suddenly flailing for her purse.  
  
“You know,” he said, watching as she tried to reach halfway across her desk without actually turning towards it, “that chair has wheels.”  
  
“Sure,” she said, her voice needlessly strained, “but where’s—the fun—in that?”  
  
She ought to have made him nervous. When he’d left home, choosing adventure over a life of staid study in a perfectly respectable elven university, they’d warned him about the younger races. How capricious they could be, how incapable of considering the effects of their actions beyond their short lifespans. Children, he’d been told, clumsy and foolish, whose brief flashes of genius or insight would inevitably be swept away by the next generation, who would be lucky to merit a footnote in an elven history. What could you possibly hope to learn from _them_? had been the unasked question, and yet he’d gone anyway, trusting that he’d find what he sought.  
  
If they could see him now, marveling as a human barely considered an adult by the standards of her own people attempted to perform a hopelessly simple task, they’d cart him home and lock him in the healing houses.   
  
“Ha!” she said, startling him out of his thoughts as her fingers caught on her purse and dragged it towards her. In a moment she’d fished her wallet out and opened it, the triumph on her face immediately fading. “Shit. I’m broke.”  
  
“Actually broke?” he asked.  
  
She gave him an exasperated look and the corner of his lips quirked in a smile. “Cash broke,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”  
  
“It’s on me,” he said, trying to shrug away the appreciative look on her face and starting for the door on the other side of the office.   
  
“Next one’s on me,” she said. “I mean, assuming you ever need a snack.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, pausing in the middle of the room, almost directly across from her desk.  
  
She pressed her lips together until they disappeared, eyebrows raised, trying to keep a straight face, but a dimple appeared in her cheek and undid all her hard work. “Oh you know,” she said casually. “Just, I don’t know, I don’t know if elves snack. I’ve seen you eat, like, lunch at your desk and stuff, but I’ve never seen you eat, like, a chocolate bar.”  
  
His brow furrowed. “I ate half a chocolate bar last week.”  
  
“Sure you did.”  
  
“You _gave_ it to me,” he protested, though he wasn’t really annoyed, was really just wallowing in sheer delight in that darn dimple, in the mischievous sparkle in her eyes.  
  
She waved a hand. “Details,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’m just saying, you’re never the one saying you’re hungry. It’s always me.”  
  
“Maybe you’re just hungrier than I am,” he said.  
  
“Right,” she said. “Because you’re an elf, and elves don’t snack.” He pressed his own lips together and gave her an exasperated look, if only because he knew it would widen her own smile. “Right, because snacking would look bad, right, ‘cause you’re all ‘oh, we don’t need to sleep, we’re so cool and mystical,’ so it would look bad if you had to admit that sometimes you just got a craving for a bag of chips or something—”  
  
He was too busy trying not to laugh that he wasn’t paying attention to his response to her words until the crumpled ball of paper in his hand was sailing to bop her right in the forehead.   
  
“Hey!” she said, rubbing the spot and scooping up the paper even as he dove after it with both hands. Now she _did_ use the wheels on her chair, pushing against her desk and sailing to the other side of the room by his desk as he stumbled into hers. “Oooh,” she said, “what’s this?”  
  
“Nothing,” he said, trying not to be too desperate as she gleefully uncrumpled it, “it’s not, it’s just notes that were going nowhere and I just needed an excuse to get up—”  
  
“I don’t know,” she said, starting to smooth it on her lap, “ _that_ looks like a picture of some—”  
  
“Jadesa,” he said, desperately this time, and she paused with her hands flat over the paper and looked up at him, biting her lip, eyes coy.  
  
A universe of wonder, that. A lifetime’s study—his, or hers several times over. More than a footnote, if only to him. If only he could think beyond just staring at her, unable to breathe.  
  
“Oh,” she said, and her fingers crinkled up the paper as she closed her fists, “all right.”  
  
“Thank you,” he said, whether for the smile or the mercy, he didn’t know.  
  
She tossed the ball of paper back to him with little regard for accuracy or appropriate force, and he still managed to snatch it out of the air with one hand, feeling rather ungraceful as he did so. But she just looked impressed, which smoothed his ruffled feathers, at least until she said, “It’s Alytha, isn’t it.”  
  
“What’s Alytha?” he asked, frowning.  
  
She nodded at his hand holding the paper. “That sketch,” she said. “It’s Alytha.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You _like_ her.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“It’s because she’s an elf,” she said, nodding sagely.  
  
He found the rest of his vocabulary. “That is the most speciest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”  
  
She shrugged and said, “And she’s, you know, _gorgeous_ , and really smart…and also an elf.”  
  
He squinted at her. “She’s twice my age, at least.”  
  
“So she’s what, a million?” Before he could do anything more than open his mouth in response, she pushed off against his desk and went sailing back to hers, holding her legs and arms out as if she were flying, and so he shut his mouth and contented himself with watching her. “Anyway, you were going to get me tea and chocolate.”  
  
“I was,” he said, aware he was still watching her, aware she hadn’t noticed.  
  
“I’m sorry I joked about your age,” she said, spinning until she sat at her desk again. She thumped her elbows onto the desk, _thump thump_ , and dropped her chin to rest on her fists. He didn’t move, and after a moment she looked at him out of the corner of her eye and said, “Pretty please?”  
  
“All right,” he said, and her eyes crinkled and he felt his do the same in return. “Herbal and dark?”  
  
“Pretty pretty please,” she said, and then her eyes slid back to her work and he turned his feet to the door.  
  
He paused in the doorway, the crumpled paper still in his fist, the big bin tucked in the corner right; and for a moment his fist tightened, and he looked over his shoulder and thought, _perhaps_ —  
  
And then his courage failed, and he tossed the paper in the bin, and went to fetch her tea and chocolate, and didn’t look back.


	3. adventurer!verse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the songs referenced in this particular chapter were either stolen from various Forgotten Realms wikis or from the lovely and talented [Fionavar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar), who did not know what she was agreeing to when I asked her to expand upon the [Lay of the Guard Captain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021321).

_very smart adventurers found a book and are looking for the treasure maps  
_

* * *

The book was fiendishly difficult, but Jadesa kind of liked that about it.  
  
After much discussion (she’d call it an argument, but the boys would disagree), they hadn’t taken it all the way back to the city but instead taken up shop in a hamlet five miles across the river. Close enough to walk to the library and back in a day, if research went well, but not so close that those of their former classmates and rivals who hadn’t gone off to seek their fortune wouldn’t immediately notice that they were in the area, so to speak. None of them wanted to be discovered, though Barakir was particularly emphatic on nobody else learning what they’d found.  
  
Not that they were even totally sure what it was. A diary, sure, written by and previously belonging to one Nishkir Khemuret Xul; and of course it was heavily encrypted and detailed a great deal of fascinating information about the lands around [wherever]. But Barakir seemed to think it held something, and something important, some bit of knowledge at the end that would change the course of history. Or something suitably epic like that. But of course the cipher built upon itself, and they couldn’t just skip to the end and decode it and find what he was looking for. So instead the rest of them worked while he skulked around, looking over their shoulders, snatching away decrypted sections as soon as they were done. Usually only to skulk back over to her table a few minutes later, asking for a translation, please.  
  
He’d always been kinda weird. But he was also kinda rich, and bankrolling the whole operation, so she couldn’t exactly complain.  
  
What she _could_ do was sing for her supper, at least when her turn came up, and so she took one last look at herself in the tiny mirror in her room (eyes a little bloodshot and saggy, but the room would be dark and she was aiming to be heard, not seen), brushed her hair behind her ears, and bounded down the stairs, two at a time. The tavern below was already full enough that she had to squeeze her way past several tables with a litany of “excuse me, sorry!”s before she reached the performers’ corner in the back, where two of her companions awaited her.  
  
“You’re late,” Connor observed as she hopped onto the makeshift stage and perched on the stool between them, his hands busy tuning his harp for probably like the third time.  
  
“Connor,” she said as she settled herself on the stool, rocking it back and forth a bit, scooting until she sat closer to the edge, tucking her feet on the top rung and taking a deep breath before continuing, “you say that like you’re surprised.”  
  
“Well,” Serannis said from her other side, “I _did_ knock on your door to tell you we had to be here in twenty minutes.”  
  
“You did,” she acknowledged, taking another deep breath and letting it out on a _hiss_ for a count of twenty. “But really it was thirty minutes before we were supposed to be here—”  
  
“Not if you want to be ten minutes early.”  
  
“—who wants to be ten minutes early?—and I did at least do my warm-ups, so I’m all ready to go now,” she said, tossing her hair. “Seriously, whenever you’re ready.”  
  
Connor muttered something under his breath about _impossible_ and she flashed him a big grin that went a little sheepish as she turned it to Serannis, hoping to catch him somewhere between _I’m sorry_ and _he’s so uptight, right?_ The elf was looking at her with a strange expression on _his_ face, not quite meeting her eyes, but before she could think about it Connor cleared his throat and strummed a chord, then another, in a sequence she immediately recognized as “A Knight’s Honor,” her least favorite ballad out of Cormyr. She cut her eyes at him but he strummed blithely on, the faint glow around his head increasing ever so slightly, and so she closed her eyes and took a final deep breath, and then she started to sing.  
  
She didn’t particularly fancy herself as a solo performer—she _could_ do it, of course, but she’d much preferred being part of the college choir, one of many voices shaping the sound to their will. On her own, she had to work harder to ignore her flaws and foibles in order to spin her spells. Some songs were easier than others, of course, and this one definitely fell into the latter category. She made it through a verse and a half, gauged the tepid response in the room, and kicked the closest leg of Serannis’s stool.  
  
He cut his eyes at her and she smiled as sweetly as she could while lingering on a long “I” right between her registers—Connor _knew_ she preferred D major for this one, he was just playing in F to be a _jerk_ —and then with relief she closed her mouth and dropped her chin, hiding her face behind her hair as Serannis began to play.  
  
He’d picked the wooden flute for tonight, the one Alytha had made him out of a reed from the marsh where he’d nearly been eaten by an alligator. Brighthip had saved him with a clever _detect thoughts_ that shouldn’t have worked nearly so well as it did, given the animal’s, well, animal intelligence, but while she hadn’t been able to read its mind it _had_ burped loudly enough to dislodge Serannis from its esophagus. He’d been very grateful to her, and less so when Alytha had presented him with her gift, but she’d bluntly said, “Having a reminder is what keeps you alive the next time.”  
  
There hadn’t been a next time, not yet, but Jadesa had noticed that he still kept the flute on him at all times, even when he wasn’t playing it.   
  
But he was playing it now, and beautifully, of course, and it really was her favorite of all his flutes, the notes clean and clear yet with a breathy softness that reminded her of—of warm blankets and campfires, and a starry sky over her head. Some of that was the magic, of course, but a lot of that was just Serannis. He had a way about him of making things—comfortable. And she could listen to him play for hours.  
  
She was making good headway on that, actually, when Connor kicked _her_ stool, and with great regret she took another deep breath and—just as Connor modulated up a step, the bastard—started in on another verse. At least this time she had Serannis’s playful descant to harmonize with, and if Connor glared at her when she dropped the octave for the last line, well, that was _his_ problem. But he just kept playing, so she plastered a smile on her face and skipped ahead to the final verse, belting for all she was worth and mostly obliterating the solemnity of the lyrics. Connor kicked her stool again and Serannis’s flute squawked once, but a few of the formerly uninterested patrons at the tables closest to them perked up, grinning and nudging each other before grabbing their tankards and singing along.  
  
Sure, some of that was magic. But given the cries of “yeah, screw ‘em!” at the end, she thought perhaps she had struck a nerve, one worth pursuing. “The Violet Pseudodragon,” she muttered to Connor.  
  
“But—”  
  
“Just _do_ it! G, please,” she said, and without waiting for his response launched into the first verse. She sang over his mutterings and slight plucking as he adjusted a string, and at the end of the first verse Serannis came in with a jaunty tag that led immediately into the second verse and so she plunged ahead. Two lines in and the nearest patron started keeping beat with his tankard, a percussive line echoed by his fellows the next table over, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Connor lay his harp on his lap in favor of clapping along with them. She lifted her eyebrows at him as they wended their way into the third verse, a softer, more mournful consideration of how perhaps the Knights of the Purple Dragon ought to be respected for their generations of sacrifice, how someone ought to give them thanks; and at his long-suffering sigh she grinned and shouted the first line of the last verse. “BUT I’LL BE ARSED IF IT BE ME!”  
  
The tavern joined in on the rest and by the end a shower of coin was flung in their direction. “The Lay of the Guard Captain,” Connor said in resignation, picking his harp back up and finishing his tuning. Not that Jadesa particularly noticed. She was too busy grinning in exhilaration at Serannis, her blood rushing through her veins and her head a little light from lack of breath; he startled when he met her gaze, his eyes going wide, and then a foolish grin crept across his elven features and she caught her breath and the lamplight sparkled around them and she couldn’t help but keep smiling back at him and he—  
  
“The _Lay_ of the _Guard Captain_ ,” Connor said again, kicking her stool as he started playing a wordless refrain, and she jumped and nearly slid off said stool, grabbing it with her hands as her toes brushed the floor and rocking back and forth until it settled again. She took a deep breath and coughed halfway through when his song choice sunk in—she could barely sing it with a straight face, let alone without blushing—and when she glanced at Serannis the tips of his ears were already red as he placed his flute to his lips and looked determinedly at the ceiling as he joined in on the refrain.  
  
The crowd was already catcalling, too, and she had to resist the urge to hide behind her hair. She settled for putting her hands over her face and shaking her head as they came to the end of the refrain. She dragged her hands away as they played the tag, shaking her head, and then she dropped her hands to her lap and sang,  
  
 _Oh, I’ll sing you the lay of the Guard Captain, defender of the law!  
_ _For justice and order within these hard times  
_ _For protecting the weak and punishing crimes  
_ _All you who call upon her name get what you call for!_  
  
The men at the nearest table whistled and Serannis’s flute squeaked before launching into a complicated countermelody that nearly threw her off the next four lines as she tried to figure out what on _earth_ he was doing. By the time they reached the next refrain—  
  
 _Oh, I’ll sing you the lay of the Guard Captain, untiring in a scrum!  
_ _Though panting and sweating, she never cried ‘Stop!’  
_ _The men all exhausted, she finished on top.  
_ _All you who call upon her name know that she will come!  
_  
—his furious rush of notes abated, and she saw the faint shimmer of a magical barrier settle over her skin. She bit off the end of the refrain and rolled her eyes—it was just a whistle, she’d had worse, they weren’t even leering at her, if she needed it she could have cast the spell herself—and cut him a look, but he just raised his eyebrows and then looked back to the ceiling, looking suspiciously pleased with himself. At least his entire ear was red now. She’d find some way to make him pay.  
  
The rest of the lay went smoothly enough, and Serannis’s spell lasted long enough that the coins thrown at her merely bounced off to pile at her feet, which some of the patrons found impressive. So she cast a cantrip and made the coins arc into the hat at Connor’s feet to further applause and more coin. The aasimir looked as if he might smile, though it thinned when she gestured to the crowd and then back to him, clapping her hands with an encouraging grin of her own. “Come on, harpist!” she said. “Let’s hear _you_ give it a try.”  
  
He narrowed his eyes at her, and then, because he was Connor and incapable of singing anything else, he began “Starfall Pool” in his rolling baritone.  
  
He looked to her to join in but she drew up her knees, perching precariously upon her stool, and watched him with rapt delight as he sang of his longing for the oasis he’d never see again. Connor didn’t sing nearly often enough, probably because he had the voice of a literal angel and hated to hear people talk about it. She hummed a harmony around his melody but didn’t dare try to sing along, first because she loved listening to him and second before she felt inadequate before the power of his voice. And his perfect pitch. And the faint tinkling of celestial bells that accompanied him whenever he went louder than a mezzo forte.  
  
By the end of this song they were practically a cathedral choir, their peals echoing in the rapt tavern once his voice ceased. As they faded, the room erupted in noise and coin and a surge of people trying to get their hands on the “holy man,” and Connor’s faintly pleased expression immediately soured. In a flash of pity she cast _invisibility_ on him and turned to Serannis. “Play!” she hissed.  
  
“What?” he asked.  
  
“Literally anything!” she said as the pilgrims’ _oohs_ turned into disappointed grumbles. She saw the slight panic in Serannis’s eyes as he put his flute back to his lips and started playing what she recognized within three notes as “The Knights of Dragon Down.” One of her favorites, but not exactly rowdy tavern material and she was used to singing it with the harp, not the flute. For a moment in the privacy of her own mind (as if her feelings weren’t also written all over her face) she flailed at the impossibility of dragging everyone’s attention away from Connor to her with _this_ song, compared to so many others—  
  
But it was time for her entrance, so she took another deep breath and then leapt from her stool, landing with her arms spread wide and her hands splayed, singing the first verse as grandly as she could, which was maybe a little screechy, a little creepy, but if nothing else, she grabbed some people’s attention. As she drew her hands together, diminuendo-ing down to a whisper, she cast a little _thaumaturgy_ and all the lights in the room flickered on “the Knights of Dragon Down.”  
  
She _felt_ the shiver go through the room, allowed the curve of a smile on her lips before reaching out to the nearest patron as she started the second verse, sweeping her gaze across the room for another person to terrify. The warm wooden breath of Serannis’s flute went cold and haunted, the air around the notes ghastly, and she felt a shiver go down her own spine. She kept singing, playing with dynamics, occasionally meeting people’s gazes and staring too intensely at them before smiling as they tightened their grips on their drinks. Her _invisibility_ expired and a moment later she spied Connor, ducking his head in the far corner of the room—and next to him Barakir, staring at her.  
  
She startled, her voice wavering on “white as bone,” but even as she recovered and pressed on, smiling her cruelest smile at a burly man sitting in front of her, she found her gaze sliding back to his. Barakir rarely bothered with the tavern, let alone the performances, either giving or attending them; he rarely bothered with much that wasn’t translating Khem’s journal, and that was honestly fine with the rest of them. Something about him was—off, something that took his otherwise handsome features and turned them…and she and Brighthip had spent hours tossing comparisons back and forth, trying to pin down what it was that bothered them, but they’d yet to manage anything other than _dead_ , which didn’t make much sense. But his skin was a little too tight and his eyes had a fire in their grey depths that belied the cool of his touch—not that she’d ever touched him on purpose, but their fingers had brushed once when he was handing her a sheet and she’d felt a bit nauseous, but that might have just been nerves.   
  
He was, as Alytha reminded them whenever she caught the younger women debating the issue, extremely rich, and he’d saved their lives on multiple occasions and he’d never once been anything other than polite and more or less kind, if a bit obsessive. But he mostly kept to himself and so there was no real reason to pry too deeply into whatever may or may not have been wrong with him.   
  
And he never came to hear them sing and yet there he was, and even from all the way across the room she _felt_ his gaze like a physical force, staring at her and through her all at once, so much so that she had to resist the urge to cast _shield_. Serannis’s barrier had long since worn off but she found herself drawing back on her stool, leaning closer to him as if the flute’s low quavering notes could serve the same purpose as a spell. She heard a shift as though he leaned back in response and for a moment she thought she saw flames in Barakir’s eyes; “sorcery now their souls doth spin,” she sang, and she thought perhaps they were tears, instead.  
  
She kept singing, of ladies’ screams and skeletal knights, and as she drew to the end of the penultimate verse she felt a kick on her stool that startled her into looking away from Barakir’s depthless gaze. Instinctively she began to _ritard_ and glanced at Connor’s stool, but of course he wasn’t there, and she darted a glance at Serannis, startled anew; he usually didn’t resort to kicking her stool. Then again, he usually didn’t have to.  
  
She shook her shoulders as their gazes met over his flute, his eyebrows raised in a question and his eyes full of a concern that made her stomach go warm and bubbly and that was all wrong for the song, and so her voice dropped away as she finished the verse. His eyebrows dropped and she realized he’d been wondering about the last verse—took her silence as an answer—and so she let him play the verse, wordless, tried to lose herself in watching his fingers dance along the flute, in the pursing of his lips as he blew into it; but she felt Barakir’s gaze keenly, all the same, and she couldn’t withhold a sigh of relief as the song came to an end.  
  
Serannis let the final note linger, held the flute for two, three, four counts after it faded into nothing, and Jadesa found herself holding her breath, half-formed spells crowding her mind just in case—and then someone started pounding their tankard on a table and the rest of the tavern followed with more cheers. Her breath left her in a rush of relief and she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, taking another depth breath.  
  
Serannis lowered his flute, briefly nodded to acknowledge the cheers, and then leaned towards her. “Are you all right?” he asked in a low voice, and she felt her cheeks redden beneath her fingertips.  
  
“Fine!” she said, and she tried to look at him but he was—close, they must have scooted closer to each other while they were performing, he was _really close_ , and his eyes were warm with a fire wholly unlike the one that haunted her mind when she closed hers—  
  
“Lovely,” said a voice above their heads, a familiar voice, not quite raspy and more or less kind, and the warm and bubbly feeling in her stomach fell away into a void of dread. She couldn’t move, beyond opening her eyes and looking up into Barakir’s as he stood over them, and she knew how she felt was written all over her face _again_ and she couldn’t help it. And he— _flinched_ , took half a step back, and something like regret but maybe just disgust flashed across his expression, and she remembered she’d made him cry.  
  
“Thanks,” she said, trying to be more or less kind in return, and she felt Serannis looking between them with increasing concern and _oh_ he was—and she—  
  
Had a large bag full of rattling coins dropped at her feet. She stared at it for a moment, then looked back up at its previous owner, who was looking at his hand—and she wouldn’t call it _skeletal_ , right, that wasn’t possible, of course, but it wasn’t healthy, either. But he caught her looking at it and withdrew his hands to behind his back, now looking at her with a hard sort of pity.  
  
“That was lovely,” he said. And then he took a step forward, just to the edge of the makeshift stage, and she still couldn’t move, and he stared at her until all she could see were the flames in his depthless eyes; and then he said, “Never sing it again.”  
  
She stared back at him, and dimly she wondered what her eyes looked like to him; and then she said, though it sounded far and away, “Of course.”  
  
He smiled briefly, and for a moment he was unfairly handsome and impossibly kind and she found herself smiling in response. And then he turned on his heel and left and she sagged, her head falling into her hands as she exhaled and drew in a shaky breath to follow it, feeling as winded as the time they’d just defeated a shambling mound only to turn around and have Connor accidentally wake a sleeping dire skunk.  
  
Remembering that made her laugh, but it came out a bit hysterical, and then she felt a hand on her hand, prying her fingers away from her face. “Are you sure,” said Serannis’s voice, as his face slowly came into view, peering up at her, “you’re all right?”  
  
Her breath caught as she saw him, and drained as she was she couldn’t help but stare at him, seeing the concern in his wide eyes, yes, of course, but also trapped in irrelevant details: the fall of curls across his forehead, in how the line of his cheekbone drew out to the tip of his ear. She felt an absurd desire to trace it with her fingers, which was silly, if not a little weird. He would definitely think it weird, but as she tried to curl her hand into a fist to resist the urge she felt—and she _realized_ —his hand was still atop hers, still holding it away from her face, and all she’d managed to do was curl her hand around his and now they were holding hands.  
  
She felt her entire chest drop away, stomach heart lungs all of it sucked away and little more than a fiery panic in their wake, burning its way up her neck and into her cheeks, and the only saving grace was her dim awareness that he was blushing, too, and then his lips quirked in a shaky panicked reassuring smile, wobbly and brief, and as it disappeared the concern in his eyes gave way to a question, searching her face as his hand tightened around hers—  
  
Someone whistled at a nearby table and in their haste to let go they only managed to tangle their fingers together and _that_ was—oh, she’d always thought he had nice fingers, just objectively speaking, of course, but—oh gods, this was _Serannis_ —she finally freed her hand and grabbed onto her stool, biting her lip and staring up at the ceiling and feeling the eyes of every single tavern patron on her blushing face.  
  
“Hey,” someone shouted, “do you know ‘Jonstan the Rover’?”  
  
“Of course,” she shouted back, entirely too loudly, and she heard Serannis sigh a laugh, exasperated and fond, and her stomach found its way back to her body and performed an acrobatic routine to announce its arrival. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, met his gaze, was relieved to see he was still blushing, too, and said, “Do you?”  
  
“Of course,” he answered, putting his flute to his lips like a challenge, and as he played the introduction she—definitely did not think about—anything else—he could have been—doing—with his—  
  
 _Clippety-cloppety, bold Jonstan the Rover  
Rides misty-eyed down to the Dales again_  
  
she began, her cheeks afire and her heart a song, and his—flute, the perfect accompaniment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aka the one where they're all bards


	4. brighthip/serannis, independence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An expansion of slave!verse: Perahn prompted me on a playlist shuffle meme and I came up with [this version of "Independence" by The Band Perry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0f1EdR2Ntk), and I'd just been saying to her that we needed some more of slave!Serannis's perspective. The irony was too great to resist, and while we're not quite in his head yet, I still, uh, enjoyed getting this glimpse of him.
> 
> Except not, because slave!verse is the worst verse and everything is awful and hurts, I'M SORRY IT'S ALL PERAHN'S FAULT.

Twice a day, the slaves are given fresh air, unless there’s pressing business at hand. The garden is small and the walls are high, but there’s sunlight and green things growing. Better than nothing. Nothing like freedom.  
  
Brighthip likes to perch in the peach tree and watch the others, letting the scent of the blossoms waft across her face and take her back to happier times, in feeling if not in memory. She’s pretty sure she’s the only one of them who knows more of the world than walls and chains—well, except perhaps Alytha, but she’s impossible to read at the best of times—and watching them experience this facsimile of independence is enlightening, and occasionally amusing, and always heartbreaking.   
  
But she’s hardened her heart against it, and so instead she lets the leaves brush across her face and chooses not to care.  
  
“Don’t move,” whispers a voice beneath her, and she obeys before she identifies its owner; a moment later Serannis is on the branch next to hers, twigs and leaves hitting him in the face, though he doesn’t seem to notice. His attention is fixed on a bird’s nest she’d noticed and then dismissed, his pale skin flushed with the exertion of climbing a tree, his hazel eyes absolutely shining.  
  
“Look,” he says, and she sits up and leans in his direction. The peach tree isn’t particularly strong but she’s tiny and Serannis is apparently lighter than he looks—hollow-boned, no doubt, and she snorts to herself even as she catches a glimpse of two small off-white eggs.  
  
“That’s exciting,” she says, and means it, at least for him. He’s easy and fun to tease—he’s so _earnest_ , and stupidly kind—but some things ought to be sacred, set apart, and he’s looking at the eggs as if he’s never seen anything like them before. “What kind?”  
  
“ _Passer domesticus_ ,” he says instantly, staring at the nest with a reflexive twitch of his hands that makes her think he’s wishing for quill and paper.  
  
“What do they look like?” she asks.  
  
He blinks and finally looks at her, his brow slightly furrowed. “House sparrows,” he says finally. “They’re about this big—”  
  
“You’ve never seen a sparrow’s nest?” she asks before she can think better of it. Stupid question, and at least she keeps her voice low; the delight in his eyes distracted her, made her forget, for a moment, who and where they are.  
  
“No,” he admits, unperturbed, and his smile is small but not painful. _Strange_ , she thinks, that he can be so ignorant and so blasé about his situation in the same breath. Maybe it’s an elf thing.  
  
And then he says, “Isn’t it beautiful?” and no, it’s just Serannis.  
  
“It’s nice,” she says honestly, because honestly she’s never been much for birds or trees or the outdoors. Always been more of a city girl herself, not that it matters now, but she’s also not going to turn into a nature-lover just because it’s the one semblance of personal space she has anymore. Out of spite, if nothing else. “Springtime, and all that.”  
  
“Hm,” he says, studying the nest again, his hands still moving unconsciously, tracing out the placement of twigs and straw wound round and round again. “Incredible.”   
  
“How so?” she asks, leaning back and crossing her arms.  
  
“So much instinct contained in so small a space, enabling such symmetry,” he said, sketching words as he sketches out the individual elements in Khemuret’s ciphers, teasing out the various shapes and pictographs and arranging them into something resembling sense. “We all of us are geniuses, and could any of us hope to ever create something so perfect?”  
  
He has a point, and the thought makes her uncomfortable. “Speak for yourself,” she says, settling further into her branch. “I’m just here because I was already here.”  
  
He glances at her, hazel at the corner of his eyes, and then looks back to the nest and says, “You’re here because you understand all those things the rest of us don’t. You’re here for…context. Connection. Don’t sell yourself short.”  
  
She barks a laugh and it’s bitter and she grinds her teeth. “Believe me,” she says, “if I could sell myself for anything…”  
  
He winces, the fine lines of his face crumpling like paper. “Sorry,” he says, and then he opens his mouth and closes it and says, “sorry.”  
  
She shrugs, mad at herself and a little guilty and still bitter, wanting to make it bright. “If the irony of the idiom’s never occurred to you before, please, don’t realize it on my behalf.”  
  
He laughs, a light little bird-laugh, and in spite of herself she smiles a little. _Elves_. “I’ll do my best to forget it,” he says, and though he says it lightly she feels the weight of a promise in it and wants to shake her head.  
  
“At least for now,” she says. “At least out here, where there’s so many nicer things to think about.”  
  
“Springtime,” he says, and then he looks at her again and says, with barely contained eagerness, “You’ve been here in the spring before, yes? Have you ever seen—”  
  
And then he stops, and at first she thinks he simply can’t decide what to ask first, and then she hears a shuffling noise below her and looks down and sees Jadesa looking up at them.  
  
“You’re up a tree,” the human observes.  
  
“It’s comfortable,” Brighthip says, shaking her head against her branch to demonstrate.  
  
“There’s a nest,” Serannis says, the barely contained eagerness a little more contained, a little more tempered, if only because his eyes shine at her as brilliantly as they shone at the sight of the eggs, fragile and sheltered and safe.  
  
Brighthip refrains from shaking her head.  
  
“Is there?” Jadesa asks, brightening, failing to refrain from anything, and Brighthip had pegged her as a cynic but—  
  
well, she can see how it’d be hard to be cynical with Serannis looking at you with equal delight.  
  
“ _Passer domesticus_ ,” he says, more intently this time, his smile broadening. “House sparrows. They’re one of the first species to breed, sometimes even beginning their mating season in mid—winter—”  
  
His voice falters as he realizes what he’s saying and Brighthip winces, closes her eyes against the sight lest her hardened heart split in two, and for a moment she only hears the slight rustle of leaves as Serannis shifts, or looks away.  
  
“How many eggs are there?” Jadesa asks, curious and determined and _kind_ , picking up the conversation as if no one had dropped it.  
  
“Two,” he says, still distant.  
  
“What do they look like?” she presses, and Brighthip feels a fissure start to form in her chest.  
  
“They’re—white,” he says, and as he corrects himself his unease vanishes into so much smoke, “well, off-white really, sort of a cream, I suppose you’d say. And speckled, just a smattering of little brown spots.”  
  
“How big?”  
  
 _Idiots_.  
  
“This big,” he says, and she unwillingly opens her eyes to see him holding his thumb and forefinger an appropriate distance apart. “I’d invite you to come see them, but—”  
  
“Oh, my peach-tree-climbing days are over,” Jadesa says with a laugh, “but thank you.”  
  
“I could sketch them,” he offers.  
  
“You should,” she says, and with bleeding hearts like these around her, Brighthip wonders that she hasn’t cracked before now. “For your collection.”  
  
“Of course,” he says, and then they’re just staring at each other; she doesn’t have to see it to know it, and to know it’s a bad idea.  
  
“Well,” she says, stretching and ignoring the startled way Serannis hops to another branch and looks at her, “as _fascinating_ as all this is, I can see I’m going to need to find another tree if I want to get a nap in before we’re called back.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, and his ears are pink and he looks abashed and she presses her lips together to keep from laughing in his face, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”  
  
“No, no,” she says, “it’s fine, I’ll just be going now, have fun with your bird’s nest,” and with that she hops to the ground, landing lightly on her feet beside Jadesa.  
  
The human looks briefly envious, and then looks back at Serannis and says, “You keep studying it. I’ll,” she pauses, clearly searching for the right word, but there isn’t one and at least she seems to realize it because she gives up and says, “see your picture.”  
  
“All right,” he says, and both women look at each other so as to ignore the wistful note in his voice.  
  
“I’m going over there,” Brighthip says, pointing to the willow tree in the corner and turning away before Jadesa can say anything else. The girl’s not stupid enough to try to confide in someone, but sometimes she talks in allusions that Brighthip doesn’t want to hear.  
  
And besides, what is she going to do, _help_? The two of them are screwed regardless of whether or not they actual screw, and there’s nothing anyone can do for them. Certainly not her, and she certainly doesn’t _care_ , about their happiness or anyone else’s. Certainly not her own.  
  
And if tonight, locked alone in the cell she ostensibly shares with Alytha, she cries herself to sleep anyway—  
  
it’s nothing.


End file.
